HS 457: The Fight for Truth with Sharyl Attkisson

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Welcome to the Holistic Survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosperity? The Holistic Survival show is your family's insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you'll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

It's my pleasure to welcome Cheryl Atkison. She is host of Sinclair's Sundays TV program Full Measure. She's a five time Emmy award winner, former correspondent and anchor at CBS News, PBS and cnn. She's a New York Times best selling author of My Fight for Truth against the Forces of obstruction, Intimidation and Harassment in Obama's Washington and the How Shady Political Operatives Fake News Control what you see, what you think, and how you vote. Cheryl, welcome. How are you?

I'm great. Thank you for having me.

It's good to have you on the show. You know, I call cyberbullying, trolling, defamation. This is the crime of our time and it gets a lot of attention when it comes to children at school and that kind of thing, but it really doesn't get much attention or play when an adult is the victim. And you have certainly had your share of this, unfortunately. I'm sorry to hear that. Tell us about some of the things that have happened to you if you would. Let's get into any possible solutions or remedies one might have as well.

Well, on the level of bullying I guess that you're referring to, there are organized campaigns now that understand how to use social media to stop either to further a narrative or stop stop a line of factual reporting. And this has been going on for probably 15 years, but it's gotten more and more sophisticated. I wrote about this in the smear. I spoke to some of the smear operators that do this for a living and you'd be surprised how in the words of one smear artist, he said you can start an entire movement with a handful of Twitter accounts, fake Twitter accounts, and 147 characters.

That's pretty scary.

Yeah, they know how to put the full force of social media to give the appearance. I call it Astroturf that there's widespread support or opposition to something when there may not be, but it picks up steam on the Internet, on social media, you get bullied and shut down. And if your bosses don't know better and you work in the media, they kind of are subjected to it and don't understand what's going on. They just say, wow, look, everybody's criticizing us. And they don't understand the nature, the organized nature of this.

Right, right. Well, who are these smear artists? I mean, can you place an ad on a job posting board for smear artists? Are they PR people? Are they social media people? Are they just disgruntled people who are sitting in a basement eating pizza? Who are they? Are they Russians? Tell us more.

Well, I think a bit, A bit of all of it. When these narratives take hold, there are disgruntled people in the basement that run with them. Maybe they don't even know, you know, where the origin came from, but the ones behind it. These are public relations firms. A lot of times it'll be called crisis management or some sort of emergency management. They are global law firms that have employees that do this. They're LLC nonprofits, blogs, super PACs. There's all kinds of groups I talk about in the smear that do this sort of work. It's a multi billion dollar industry. Now. It's very Washington centric. That's not all here, but it's Washington centric. And, you know, once you start looking into it, you can start seeing it everywhere. And now I'm at the point where I see a narrative on the news or tv, and I know that was started or generated through a rather sophisticated or organized effort of talking points and narratives and people who are trained and disseminated and using nonprofits to make it look like this is coming organically from real people. It's really fascinating.

It's the ultimate era of propaganda, isn't it? I mean, we, you know, when we were kids, we were in school and we used to hear about how the Soviet Union during the Cold War used propaganda. Right. There's that North Korean movie which is actually pretty interesting. I think it was pro North Korea, but it was about. It's called propaganda. I don't know if you saw that.

I heard about it.

Yeah. It's pretty fascinating, actually. Are we in an era, Cheryl, where people have become more gullible, or are they seeing that a lot of this stuff is fake and, and, you know, even at the, at the micro scale in one person's life, I mean, I've certainly been A victim of trolling by competitors that are trying to steal my business. It's just terrible. And you know, you don't get the chance to explain, you don't get the chance, you don't get your day in court. You never get to face your accuser because these are anonymous drive by shootings, you know, on the Internet. And of course, you know, thankfully I've now become very skilled with working with cyber investigators and things like that. And, and you really can get these people most of the time because they're always going to leave some fingerprints. But again, then what do you do? You go to court. It's just a very difficult thing, you know, so I'm just wondering like if life in this vein is, is better with the Internet or maybe it's a lot worse. In the old days if someone was smearing you, you could probably find out who it is and you could go and face your accuser. Nowadays, not so much. Right?

Well, yeah, and in the old days, I mean, one of the first things I learned in journalism school was when someone brings you a press release or a narrative or talking points, that's propaganda. That's what they want you to report. And that's not what you ever report or hardly ever report. Now there may be nuggets of newsworthy information in there, but it's one bit of it. And you have to go out as a reporter if you think it's an interesting story and find the facts. But too often now the reason I think there's more of this than ever, we haven't put that firewall up. We now take this stuff and put it on tv. We've made it easy to smear people and easy to disseminate their propaganda. And they know it. They know how to get in. When I first came to Washington and I would see as a reporter at cbs, wow, New York Times, Washington Post gets all these scoops. You know, some official told them X, Y and Z. I came to realize, you know, they do some very good in depth reporting as well.

Right.

But a lot of those things we thought of as scoops were just disseminating propaganda because a government official knew who they could call and they put it on the front page and the rest of us went, wow. Instead of saying, wait a minute, exactly, this is what the government wants us to think. Now what's the truth? Maybe it's there, maybe it's not. But let's look at that instead of just vomiting it out without any critical.

Reporting, no question about it. And you know what's really scary about that is the way the media gets to report things. Now look, we need a free press. We need reporter shield laws, you know, we need the First Amendment so that you can get anonymous sources. But even a publication as credible, in my opinion, as the Wall Street Journal, you know, they constantly say things like, you know, a source close to the matter said or, you know, I mean, where is the accountability here if you don't have to name any names ever, People familiar with the subject say, you.

Know, it could be your neighbor.

I know, yeah, it's just meaningless. Right? And a reporter doesn't even have to tell anybody at their own organization who this source is. They can keep it 100% to themselves. How do we reconcile that and have a free press at the same time? A free but credible press?

Well, I think there's a problem there because I'm certainly not for clamping down on, you know, our freedom to operate. But I also, like you see that we've, many of us have done it irresponsibly, the use of anonymous sources. I mean, we had pretty strict rules. Like all my stories that were of any note investigative wise, I put through lawyers at CBS and I do at my current job, full measure, voluntarily. No one makes me do that. That's just what I do for my protection. And they go through the list of questions of what we should be asked and how we can support this and that. That exercise apparently doesn't exist in most places for most stories because most reporting I see on these types of things wouldn't have been allowed or approved or check marked by the lawyers I deal with. Nor should it have been because of the reasons you explain. I mean, our rule was sometimes you do have to use anonymous sources, but it's rare, it's a last resort. It should be. I use them mostly just to confirm other reporting or to lead me somewhere. I try not to use them much in my actual stories. They lead me to somebody who can then go on camera. The knowledge or the information leads me elsewhere. And then when we use them, we're supposed to describe with as much specificity as possible, number one, why we can't name them, and number two, how they're related to the issue. So the people at home can decide whether they're conflicted. They have a right to know. Is this a disgruntled former employee? You know, just some tidbit of information to help weight what you're telling them. And instead I've seen the most well reputed, formerly well reputed news organizations just tossing out one Charge after the other, unverified or as they themselves say about Trump with no evidence.

Right.

Making claims based on anonymous sources and being wrong time and again.

And it even gets worse than that. Everything has become such an agenda now. Cheryl, you know, when you look at Jeff Bezos, who, you know, after he purchased the Washington Post, I mean, he literally assigned a group of some 20 odd reporters to go after Trump. I mean, it was like a known thing. I mean this, I think most of.

These organizations I know did a version of that, including my alma mater at cbs. I mean, they have teams, they started putting out notes. Here's how you can contact me confidentially if you have inside information on the Trump administration. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with getting stories, but they suddenly got this shot of investigative Vigor suddenly in 2016 and particularly after Trump was elected that they didn't seem to have prior to that.

Yeah, I know. It's something else. It really is. Is there anything else that we can do about it? I mean, see, in the old days of media reporters and anchors and so forth, they really had, at least they seemed to have like a real sort of reputation that they were concerned about. Nowadays everybody's in the media business, you know, we're all little mini publishers and PR firms, even on Facebook, right, With our own small group of friends. Should there be some criteria to be in the media? Should there be a license? I would hope not. But it makes you question, you know.

I don't think so. Because actually some of the good reporting that the so called mainstream media that would have licenses will not do is being done by outside sources, raised by outside sources. At least we have that. I think, you know, I thought long and hard about things you could do and none of them I don't know where to go with. But one of them is we should voluntarily have sort of a criteria organization that we say we subscribe to certain standards and then we get a check mark on the organization of the news program if we do it, no check mark if we don't. Stuff like what I just said about anonymous sources to be used rarely. And if they are used, we try to do X, Y and Z. Certain tenets. Problem is the people that make judgments, the people that step in to do fact checking, media literacy, deciding who's right and wrong, they're conflicted themselves in many instances. There's some of the conflicted players telling everybody else, well, this stuff's true and your stuff isn't, when in fact it's a matter of dispute. So I'm worried when we start talking about third parties intervening in any way.

Oh, I agree. Look at Snopes. I believe you did a. An article on your blog about it. You know, everybody used to consider that to be a credible news vetter, but it was discovered that that was, you know, Snopes had its own agenda. Right. Everybody's got an agenda nowadays. And media, just regardless of what side of the aisle anybody listening is on, it always leans to the left. It just does. That's the type of person generally that I think gets into media. You know, not completely, of course, but by and large, I mean, am I wrong on that?

I don't think you're wrong. I mean, that's been my experience, looking back. But I also would say that for a lot of my career, that wasn't an issue because if you're trained properly, you suspend your personal opinions, you try to see things from different sides. I work really hard almost every day to do that. And it took me some time to understand I wasn't always doing that, coming from, you know, liberal education. But I had a fair background and fair mind, and I really started to think critically about things people were accepting without supporting evidence. Why did we, as journalists. I remember my first job, we all hated the Republican Congress, local congressmen, but we liked the Democrats. And I didn't know why, because I didn't even know the difference between Democrats and Republicans. And I remember walking around the office asking, well, what's the difference? And why do we like Maggie Herchala, but we don't like this guy? And I started to think about these ways we report and the unintentional bias. But again, I think it worked for many years, in many instances. I worked at CNN and PBS and local news and cbs, and there was a lot of great fair reporting done. But now it's almost as if the green light has been given for people's own biases to come out. We used to be discouraged from bringing that out in a story and now were rewarded for it. So you suddenly see all of that coming out.

Where are we going with this? What are we going to do?

I think fewer and fewer people are believing it. I mean, I still think a lot of people do because they don't pay close attention. But among those who do pay attention, I say that's how Donald Trump got elected. Because, as you know, Hillary Clinton spent far more money. There was far more positive media coverage on Hillary than Trump and far more positive social media on her and lots against him. So how did he win? Unless there were A substantial number of people that have tuned this out and understood the nature, the manipulated nature of what we see online. So I think that's number one. Number two, as they sense this, those who try to control the narrative, they're further trying to control what we see. That's these efforts to do media literacy and teach fake news in school, or what they're trying to teach kids in some instances are, well, if you see it in the New York Times, that's good, but don't believe this stuff you don't see elsewhere. And these Google searches shouldn't return these outlying studies and information and websites, because we've decided that's not true. It's a way to further narrow information, to curate it for us in a way that's conflicted. And I think we're going to see more and more of that.

Yeah. So the media is really their own worst enemy because they're just losing credibility, aren't they?

They are. But I think, again, I talked about this in the smear. It's not as if it happened by accident. Real journalists didn't want to see this happen. But it slowly, we allowed it to happen. And I spoke to the lawyers at CBS, you know, 10, 15 years ago, when I would see these organized efforts against our stories by big global firms, law firms and so on, before and after they aired behind the scenes. And I said, you know, we need to have something in place that fights back against this propaganda effort. All we're doing is reacting. And we're too busy covering the news to come up with a strategy plan, but they're spending billions of dollars on their strategy plans, and we just never did have one. So what they did, meaning the people that want to advance their narratives, they got their personnel trained, they got them hired inside the media, they got them hired as pundits, where they're allowed access to newsrooms, they're invited on every day. They found all kinds of ways to get their nose under the tent. And now, you know, when they make mistakes or the news is biased or the reputation is hurt, they don't care. These people aren't journalists at heart. They're propagandists. And they're happy to have their side of the story out there, even if later there's some fuss over it being incorrect because they're not journalists.

Yeah, it's a crazy time. You know, what concerns me maybe more than anything is the big tech platforms, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Google. Probably the scariest company on Earth is Google. I'd say second scariest is Facebook, the way they are sorting news. And maybe I've been completely out of the loop here, but I really never heard the term used to any degree, any real degree, the term fake news, until the morning after Trump was elected. Suddenly there was this giant concern from Google and Facebook about fake news. And, you know, who's to decide? How can anybody or any algorithm or any AI decide what is real and fake? It's just impossible. And when you see the way these platforms have shut down people, and I'm not even saying I agree with these people, just understand that. I just, it's like that old quote, maybe it was Voltaire. You know, I, I don't know, maybe it wasn't Voltaire, but whoever who said, you know, I may disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death your, you know, to protect your right to say it.

Right, agreed.

Yeah, yeah. And so these platforms, these tech companies with where nobody has any recourse, are literally revising the First Amendment. You know, it's insane what they're doing. The way they kicked Alex Jones off The payment platforms, PayPal, you know, Facebook, Google, Twitter. I mean, they destroy people's businesses because they can control what you. It's not what you see necessarily, it's what you don't see. Right. You just won't show up. You'll become irrelevant. They can make you irrelevant with a click of a mouse.

Right.

Think about that.

And you know, you've stated this is obvious, but the one reason things can't be arbitrated, first of all, they're being arbitrated, the facts being arbitrated by conflicted players who want you to think a certain thing, number one. Number two, facts are in disputes and opinions are in dispute. Right now there's a huge movement to make sure nobody knows about the alleged link between vaccines and autism. Even though the government's own chief scientist, who was defending vaccines in court, he's very pro vaccine, claims that he told the government years ago there was a link and they covered it up. Well, you know, under the rules of Google and Facebook, they'll just say that's not true.

Right.

Which isn't true. They'll say that's not true. That won't show up on any search. If you look for it, his information. No, no studies will be there because they're going to prematurely and incorrectly determine that that's not true. And that's what scares me.

So scary. You know, YouTube I just saw now, Prager University, Dennis Prager's group, is suing Google and YouTube you know, same company, obviously. Let's hope they get somewhere. I don't know if they will, though. The way the laws are written with the Communications Decency act and so forth, this is just, it's an uphill battle. But YouTube, I just saw an article the other day that said they're going to stop indexing conspiracy theories in search results. Well, do you know?

Yeah, conspiracy theory. And secondly, I write about this in the premier. Conspiracy theories are often true, by the way.

Of course they are.

The phrase conspiracy theory has been controversialized. That started with the CIA after the Kennedy assassination. This is well documented. Many things are conspiracies. I mean, Bonnie and Clyde was a conspiracy. ISIS is a conspiracy. The mob is a.

Well, let me, let me give you, let me, let me add to your conspiracy list. The United States of America was a conspiracy against Britain. I mean, would someone not have reported that in 1776? This is insane.

Not under this criteria.

I know, I know. It's, it's, it's absolutely crazy. What I think needs to happen with these tech companies who really scare me more than the mainstream media is they need to make their algorithms public and open source so everybody can see why the results are the way they are in those search results. Or they need to be regulated like utility companies, or they need to be busted up under antitrust laws. And let's hope either one, two, or all three of those things happen because these companies are larger than many governments. And you can say the stupid libertarian thing that I'll always hear. And by the way, I consider myself to be somewhat of a libertarian, but it'll be, well, just don't use Facebook. Just don't use Google. That's like saying don't use the phone company. It's a, it's an absurd comment. Right. You have to use those things. They've crowded everybody out and so there is no other option. These companies are way too big. They need to be split up into smaller parts. The way the AT&T was split up. There needs to be transparency in why the results, the search results are the way they are. It's absolutely.

Here's why I don't. Two thoughts on that. I think that if people want their information curated, you should be able to check a box. Let them do it. But I don't think they should do it automatically. That or default you into that. And secondly, one reason I don't think they're going to be broken up. You have to think like two layers past.

Sure.

The government wields a great deal of Control. And I don't mean a single politician. I just mean in general, those who want to control the narrative, they control that by allowing Facebook to exist. They may fuss and complain about it, but they can threaten Facebook and therefore make Facebook develop these algorithms that are favorable to the positions they want to take, and then they have control over the information. So it's sort of a. One hand washes the other. And I don't think the government wants to regulate them or make them, you know, look like a monopoly that has to be broken up because then the power brokers lose their control over these major companies.

Well, that's true. It's like the schools. You know, the schools have become brainwashing institutions, the universities have become brainwashing institutions, and the tech companies have become brainwashing institutions. And it would seem, if anybody is willing to tackle this, it would seem like the Trump administration is. It's just. Yeah, I know. It's centralized power. I agree with you. I'm not saying it's likely to happen, but I'm just saying it needs to happen. Something needs to happen. The idea. Think about it, Cheryl. The idea that you could be on the telephone and have a conversation on the phone, and the phone company would say to you, we don't like what we're talking about. We're not going to provide service to you. They can't do that because they are utility and utilities are regulated, and I'm no big fan of regulation. Okay, but they can't do that. They can't turn off Alex Jones or whomever. Right. Because their utilities, their infrastructure, and everybody has a right to access them. They just have to pay the fee. Right? And here we're paying with our information. Obviously, something has got to change. I think that's the tech companies are the biggest issue of them all, you know?

Well, I urge your listeners to visit gab.com which has been smeared and falsely portrayed as some sort of white supremacist Twitter alternative, when in fact, it was a Silicon Valley guy that supported Trump that was shut out by social media and attacked and decided to start his own platform. And there are people that actually start fake accounts on there to make it look like a big place for white supremacists. The fact is, yeah, you can tune anything out, just like Twitter. You can block it. You can shape it so you don't have to see anything hateful, and you can shape it, you know, accordingly. And they censor nothing except that which is illegal. They will not take your political speech, even if distasteful. On either side. You, the user, censor it out, but they don't do it for you. Well, they have been knocked off, you know, of the app you can't get on itunes. Their service provider canceled them, their host canceled them. I mean, they've been so controversialized and they're just sticking in there and really trying hard to make a go of it despite every large company in the government being against them and the smear campaign being used against them. But I would urge your listeners to check it out. Gab.com yeah, thanks.

I'm looking at it now. Would you join with your own name on gab.com, your own username, your real name or not? Yeah, I'm just kind of curious. Yeah, good stuff. Well, Cheryl, give out your website and tell people where they can find your work and also tell them about that recent article you have that's been widely circulated.

Thank you. Well, Cheryl atkison.com even if you misspell it, it should come up in a search, theoretically. For Now Anyway, Cheryl Atkison.com and the popular article, there are plenty of lists of all of Donald Trump's fact errors, but we were making so many in the media, nobody was. We were acting sort of like it was a one way street. So I started compiling some of the big errors in what I call media mistakes in the Trump era. All of them so far have been made in his disfavor. In other words, it starts to look like more than just honest mistakes when all of them are made against him. And I started with 50. I think I'm up to 69. I try to add to it when I can. So if you look, if you search under media mistakes, you'll find that article. And then Fullmeasure News is my independent TV program on Sundays. But you can see replays there anytime. We try to cover the stuff no one else is covering because all they do is cover Washington and Donald Trump 24 7. There's really a lot of other stuff going on in the world and we try to be like more like the old fashioned news stations used to be and bring some of that to you.

Excellent. Cheryl, thanks for joining us today. Really fascinating interview and keep up the good work.

Thanks a lot for having me.

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